Meditation on the Studio Wall

I was reading W.G. Sebald’s, The Rings of Saturn, and came across a passage where he speaks of two Persian friars who had brought the first eggs of the silkworm from China.

At present my studio is a building behind my house.

It was an amazing process involving a strange gelatinous concoction of silver nitrate and other chemicals heated in a crock pot in the darkroom to be later cooled and then squeezed through a kitchen ‘ricer’ and then reheated. The liquid was then carefully poured onto the surface of a very clean pieces of glass put into the back of the 4″ X5 camera and exposed.

Sunday, November 1. The Artist Studio: Disappearances and reappearances, is one of three ‘open studio’ events that Trudi Lynn Smith and I staged in order to invite dialogue around a project that we had been working on involving photography and the studio space at 562 Fisgard Street.

Despite our strategies to bridge the visual gap between the photograph and the thing being photographed, that distance stubbornly remains…

Part of my attraction to the work is that it could not survive, and now only exists in relatively few murky black and white photographs that I peer into in an attempt to reconstruct it in my mind.